How to Use Surveys to Improve eCommerce Conversions

If you want to find how your e-commerce website is going, then there is no better method than to ask for the opinion of the people who use it. The conversion rate is everything for an e-commerce business. So, if things are not going in the right direction, it means that you need to listen to your visitors. If you give them the best online experience, then the growth of the conversion rate will also come.
Surveys are the best method to use if you want to know what your visitors think about your website. More than 80% of online businesses focused in the past 5 years on optimizing conversions. More than 50% also use feedback surveys as a method to improve their conversion rates. Regardless of the method you use to create your surveys, if you invest in gathering your customer’s feedback, you will be able to adapt your e-commerce business to the needs and requirements of your target audience.

Surveys Can Improve Your Ecommerce Conversions

Implementing a survey on your e-commerce website right now is important for two reasons:

• You will have immediate access to your customer’s insights.
• When your visitors answer to surveys, they will tell you precisely what went wrong during their visit.

Discovering the reasons why your potential customers left your website and asking this in an unobtrusive way helps you take your e-commerce business to the next level. Especially when the competition is right behind the corner, waiting for a mistake from your side, you need to uncover the insights to help you grow your conversions.

Popular survey tools

It is not so complicated to make an online survey. But why lose your time creating the template and implementing it, when you have several tools which offer you a lot of features for free to create amazing surveys. Take a look at the examples below:

1. Survey monkey – this is the most popular survey tool you can use nowadays. It offers a free version which allows you to set 10 questions, have 100 respondents, 15 question types, and theme customization and templates.
2. Typeform – this is a creative survey tool. The free version offers you unlimited questions and answers, data export, basic reporting, and custom design themes.
3. Zoho Survey – this is a decent online survey which has also an online version. You don’t have to pay anything, and you will have unlimited surveys, 15 survey questions, and 150 responses.
4. Survey Gizmo – helps you create some great looking surveys. Choose the free option and you will have unlimited surveys and questions, with 50 respondents, and a couple of basic question types. You will have also free templates and basic exporting.

Success story thanks to website surveys

Beer Cartel was founded in 2009 and since then they craft the largest range of beers in Australia. Their portfolio includes right now more than 1000 beers. In 2017, its founder decided to grow his business. Therefore, in order to tackle the challenges that come together with expansion, he decided to develop the Australian Craft Beer Survey. This survey helped the founder discover who is his target audience.
Therefore, the survey stated with questions about the age range, gender, and what types of alcoholic drinks they prefer. The next set of questions digs into the beer preference and aim to discover more about their visitors’ experience with craft beer. In addition, instead of promoting their survey on the market, they encouraged businesses to share their survey and receive instead a free copy of the industry results. This is how they created a win-win situation. On one hand they will have their survey promoted, and on the other hand, the promoting business will receive a detailed report on the industry and understand where they stand.
In addition, they also offered some advantages to the clients who promoted their survey. They offered the chance to win a $500 craft beer and receive a ten-dollar coupon code. The results looked as follows:

• More than 17,000 took the survey;
• Their site traffic grew by 100%;
• The revenue increased by 34% in comparison to the previous year;
• Their mailing list increased by 130%;
• There were more than 20 articles written about this survey.

Create survey feedback with Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps you match the events with the action. For example, you can determine which was the intent of your visitors and compare it with the actual action. You will be able to see which were the pages they visited, how much time they spent on each page, and which was the page they exit on. By having access to all this information, you will be able to personalize your surveys and decide which is the category of people you want to target.
Now that you know more about the tools to use and develop your surveys, it is very important to decide on the questions you want to use to get your customers’ feedback. There are 4 basic questions you can ask your visitors and find information on how to increase conversions for your e-commerce website.
#1: Why did you visit our website today?
If you record the answer to this question in your analytics tool, you will easily determine how effective is your marketing strategy. This is one of the most powerful questions you can ask your new visitors and determine what made them visit your website. What is more, by connecting the survey tool to your analytics software, you will also determine which was the marketing channel that brought them to your website. Thus, you will know which are the most productive marketing channels and focus only on those.
#2: Why are you leaving the page?
If you want to grow your conversion rate, you need to know why people are leaving your page. There are many reasons behind their decision. They leave either because they didn’t find what they were looking for or it might be that they were just browsing, and they didn’t find anything interesting for their needs. On the other hand, you should also be prepared to expect lower response rates. However, they will give you valuable insights on those little things you might have overlooked to improve conversions.
#3: What information are you looking for?
This question will help you receive valuable information for specific pages. It is important to know if your visitors found the information they were looking for when they reached your website. You can schedule this question to pop-up after your visitors spent a certain amount of time on your page. This is how you will find out if people are visiting your page for the purpose it was created, or they are actually looking for something else.
#4: How likely are you to recommend this website to others?
You can use this question to measure the customer satisfaction rate. This is how you will determine the overall experience your visitors had on your website. What is more, based on the answers you receive to this question, you will also assess how your future visitors will react in case you optimize your website or update the site navigation page. When you have an e-commerce business, it is very important to evaluate constantly your customers’ satisfaction. Therefore, the answer to this question will tell you what are the areas you need to improve to transform your visitors into customers.
If you combine the four questions above, you will accurately determine the reasons why your e-commerce business is working or not. In case you target international presence, it is also essential to use established translation services to translate your surveys in several languages. What is more, the real challenge for e-commerce business owners is not to fix what went wrong, but to understand the feedback received from the website visitors. Therefore, it is equally important to understand what you have asked and what you have received. This is why using these four questions and the survey tools above you will be able to set the correct tone in order to get real insights.
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Kristin Savage nourishes, sparks and empowers using the magic of a word. Along with pursuing her degree in Creative Writing, Kristin was gaining experience in the publishing industry, with expertise in marketing strategy for publishers and authors. Now she had found herself as a freelance writer. You can find her onFacebook and Medium.